Elon Musk’s DOGE Dorks Gut USAID

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Welcome back to Pod Say of the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Just when I thought I couldn't be less excited about this Super Bowl, we find out that Trump's doing the interview that Biden skipped twice, and now he's going to the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

I know, I know.

I guess we get Kendrick Lamar.

That's true.

I mean, Trump's not like us.

I wonder if Kendrick will do or say anything at half time.

Probably not.

Probably not.

Nobody, you know.

Nobody cares anymore.

Nobody's really doing what.

Kendrick used to be very focused on politics.

Now he's focused on Drake.

Remember when Kendrick came to the Ole?

I do.

I do remember that.

Obama.

Obama, huge Kendrick.

Yeah.

Those albums were great.

Still great.

Grammy winner now.

Ben, I thought we were going to lead the show today with a brand spanking new trade war with Canada and Mexico, but it seems like all the threats over the weekend from Trump to slap 25% tariffs on these countries were bluster, and the Canadians and the Mexicans just found a way to offer up some fake concessions or like repackage things they'd already already done or said they would do to, I guess, buy another month of negotiations.

But

bummer, man, we were promised a trade war.

We got a fentanyl czar in Canada.

Yeah, it's like having some extra gifts, you know, somewhere under the bed or in the garage that you just, you realize you forgot a birthday or something and you just take them out.

Let's see, I did get you something.

I got you a book, my book.

I got you a fentanyl czar, you know.

Have you read After the Fall?

But I mean, it is just the absurdity of these being wholly designed for American news cycles and not the world that we actually live in.

Shane Baum seems to understand, too, that she can kick the shit out of Trump and in her own

media and her own language.

And I guess they're not speaking Spanish in the White House because then he praises her every time he talks about her.

So she may be setting an example for how you deal with things.

Yeah, she's smart.

She's fighting back, punched back.

I don't think the Justin Trudeau fly to Mar-a-Lago gets slapped around and called the 51st state approach was as effective.

I did like their red state-focused.

That was smart.

And they're going to tariff a bunch of like, you know, Kentucky whiskey and things that come from red states.

It wasn't just enjoyable to me.

I actually thought that was a smart strategy.

So the people are adjusting to this.

But, I mean, look, the trade war will be back.

I mean, I think what we've learned is that...

Anything any other country does that he doesn't like,

he's just going to threaten tariffs and we're just going to live with that.

Yeah, he's got like one card in the the deck.

It is frustrating, though, because, as we just discussed, Trump got nothing really substantively.

Like, Shane Mom said she'd send some more troops to the border.

They're already there.

It's not that periodically.

Troops will do fentanyl checks anyway.

It's hard to detect.

It's compact.

Yeah, the Canadians named the fentanyls are.

I think I read that like 70 pounds of fentanyl was seized at the northern border over three years as opposed to 70,000 at the southern border.

So it's just not really the issue up there.

It's literally a weight that I could carry.

Yeah, in like a rucksack.

That's not exactly a national security crisis.

No, but Trump did decide to impose 10% tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S.

China announced some retaliatory tariffs.

American coal and LNG is going to get hit with like 15% tariffs, 10% on some other stuff, like crude oil and ag machinery.

China will take some other things.

I think that, I guess we'll see what happens there.

And also, everyone in Europe is wondering whether tariffs on the EU are next.

So stay tuned.

It seems to be.

I mean, he was threatening it.

I mean, I think that the main thing we're going to watch is while American consumers of political news live in 24-hour cycles, the four-year cycle is going to be one in which the entire world reorients its systems of trade and economics away from the United States as if we're like the insane drunk in the corner of the party.

And nobody wants to necessarily go up and fight that person, but they definitely move to the other side of the room.

And the Chinese think that they can just stand on the other side of the room and have people come to them.

And they're probably right about that.

They're probably right.

Not that I've ever been that drunk guy in the room.

Have I been that drunk?

Yes.

I don't remember.

I have, but I've never threatened tariffs while I was drunk.

Maybe you start

tariffing people.

Okay, well, we have a by the way, this is a good point to re-air my theory that presidents who don't drink any alcohol

seem to be weird.

You know, George Bush started a war,

Joe Biden

ran for re-election.

You know, maybe it's okay to have a glass of wine when you're president.

Have a drink, get a dog.

It's only going to help you.

We have a very Trump-heavy show today.

We're not happy about it.

It's not really a problem.

It is what it is, people.

It is what it is.

Yeah, there's some really big important stuff happening in U.S.

foreign policy that is going to impact the world that we're going to dig into.

We're going to start with Trump's attempt to use Elon Musk and the Doge nerds to shut down the U.S.

Agency for International Development or USAID.

We're going to look at the purge happening in the FBI.

Nothing ominous about that, Ben.

Then we'll cover Secretary of State Marco Rubio's first trip to Latin America and a truly awful idea that emerged from his time in El Salvador.

We'll also explain why Gitmo's back in the news.

We'll tell you about a surprising choice to lead State Department's public diplomacy efforts.

And then finally, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netyahu is in D.C.

today.

He is meeting with Trump in a few minutes.

We're recording the first half of this show before that meeting happens, so we can, for timing reasons.

But we'll cover whatever comes out of it after the show, including there's some, Trump just signed an executive order going back to his old Iran strategy of maximum pressure.

So great.

Yeah.

That'll solve it.

Yeah.

And then, Ben, you did our interview today.

Who did you talk to?

Yeah, I talked to Yustra L.

Bagir, who is the Africa correspondent for Sky News.

Yustra was in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently covering the M23 advance

into the DRC.

So she breaks breaks down kind of what's happening, why it's happening now.

Importantly, for people,

what are the resources at stake?

Who's buying those resources?

Spoiler alert, it's some of the same Western governments that usually criticize things like what's happening in the DRC, what it's like to cover such a

multifaceted conflict, what happened to the Congolese state, and then also importantly, like what's on the minds of the people that you sort of talked to Ngoma and kind of what is just wrong with how the Western government and philanthropic community has approached Africa.

The DRC is kind of emblematic of all those things.

So really interesting interview about the DRC and what's happening there, but also just about what it says about how the kind of world is working in 2025, which

is a kind of late-stage capitalist nightmare that we're living.

I'll definitely check that out.

We covered a lot there, yeah.

Also, Sher Yusra's sister, Nima, is another great journalist who's been on the show.

Yeah, and she's Sudanese by heritage and just really extraordinary reporters.

So a reminder that

apart from the

tech bro, multifaceted experts on X, there are actual journalists in the world who can tell you what's going on.

So please follow people like Yusra and her sister and not

some guy that was the 19th investor at PayPal.

Well said.

Okay, so let's talk about USAID.

We are now a couple weeks into Trump's 90-day freeze on foreign assistance.

The impact of that move has now been compounded by Elon Musk's announcement that he's going to shut down the USAID or merge USAID with the State Department.

Secretary of Defense,

Secretary of State, Secretary General, Marco Rubio, I think we're going to call him that for now, announced that he is the new acting administrator of USAID and that the agency is now under Rubio's purview.

On Monday, a bunch of Democrats held a press conference outside of the USAID building and later tried to enter it.

Elon Musk tweeted that that was an insurrection.

Kind of funny.

Here's a clip of.

Jamie Raskin, the shaman.

Here's a clip of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy talking about why shuttering USAID is so damaging.

Elon Musk has been floating all sorts of awful, terrible conspiracy theories about what happens at USAID.

Let's make it very clear that every single day, America is safer because of what happens at USAID.

USAID fights terrorist groups all across this world, making sure that we address the underlying causes for a retreat to terrorism.

USAID chases China all around the world, making sure that China doesn't monopolize contracts for critical minerals and port infrastructure all around the world.

It supports freedom fighters everywhere in this world.

Up until yesterday, delivering firewood, for instance, to the brave Ukrainian defenders on the Eastern Front.

But let's not pull any punches about why this is happening.

Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China.

And China is cheering at this action today.

Murphy later stormed the USAID building and took a dump on the assistant administrator's desk.

That's a joke.

I do like that Murphy's trying to find the why here.

Kind of create an enemy.

I do think that's important.

But, you know, we'll see.

So, Ben, a bunch of USAID staffers were told not to come to the office in D.C.

Their emails were frozen all over the world.

And then Elon Musk, of course, Ben took to Twitter to start attacking USAID as a criminal organization.

I think he said it was run by radical Marxists.

Trump got in on the fun.

He said the USAID was run by radical lunatics.

So a little

twist

on the unfair allegations.

And then Elon's staff, I guess, tried to storm into a secure facility and access classified information without a clearance.

So it's a mess.

For those unfamiliar with USAID, it's an independent agency that was first set up in 1961 under the Kennedy administration and has become a critical source of global humanitarian funding that ranges from disaster assistance to global health programs like HIV/AIDS treatment treatment or monitoring and responding to disease outbreaks like Ebola or the bird flu, like very important stuff.

In 2023, USAID managed about $40 billion that was appropriated by Congress for programs in 130 countries.

That is a lot of money, but less than 1% of the federal budget.

And it tends to be well under the 0.7%.

percent of gross national production target that a lot of wealthy countries use for their international assistance target.

So the Post, the Washington Post said the top recipients of USAID funding include Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia.

And just for what it's worth, this attempt to unilaterally close or fold USAID into state is illegal because it's an independent agency and you can't do that.

Congress would have to.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii has announced that he's going to put a blanket hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees until this attack on USAID ends, which could take a while.

So, Ben, why don't we just pause there?

Mike, can you just talk about, in your opinion, eight years working in the administration, what the value of USAID was, both, I don't know, in terms of the development assistance in these programs, but also the value to U.S.

national security and our ability to advance U.S.

interests or values abroad.

Yeah, I mean, we talked about this a bit last week, so I don't want to cover exactly the same ground.

The short version is USAID, those countries point to what their priorities are.

They overlap significantly with American national security interests.

You know, they're in Ukraine buttressing the Ukrainian state.

They're in Somalia as part of the counter-al-Shabaab strategy, a terrorist organization that had aspirations to strike in the United States.

They've been in Iraq and Syria as part of the counter-ISIS mission.

If you don't want Ebola to come to the United States,

you need USCID personnel on the ground helping create clinics and supporting healthcare workers to stop epidemics before they get here.

All these things are true, and the way that Chris Murphy framed them are absolutely true.

And if we withdraw from that business, we will be more endangered by terrorists and by disease.

We will certainly basically allow China to kind of run the international finance and development aspects of the world order.

They've been building that, preparing for this moment for some time with a parallel, an alternative set of institutions, including the Belt Road Initiative, which we've talked about a bit, which is entirely a development-focused initiative of bringing Chinese infrastructure and kind of tying the world into supply chains that run to Beijing.

So, you know, on its face, it's stupid because it disadvantages the United States in not being in those places and not addressing those issues.

I think more profoundly, though, I've been thinking about this, Tommy.

It almost depresses me that we have to give the kind of speeches that Chris Murphy gave or that, you know, I've said on this podcast and other places about why you should care.

We should care because we should care.

We should care because we should give a shit that this is the institution that helps end famines or that goes to places where there's a genocide.

There's something wrong with our country that we even think that we have to kind of go

tell people, you know,

here's why this helps fight terrorism.

I mean, I get what we should.

We have to become the kind of country that wouldn't necessarily even need to kind of make these kind of bang shot arguments.

But that is also in our national interest because the rest of the world is looking at us and saying, Those people clearly don't give a shit.

And everything we've ever said that we were taught as kids about America standing for certain things in the world, the whole moral high ground that America tries to claim in every single dispute in the world with a Russia or China goes out the door when you've got a bunch of fucking gamer, incel, 20-year-old Doge dudes like marauding through the headquarters of the USCID in the Ronald Reagan federal building in Washington, D.C.

The rest of the world looks at us and thinks, this has now become a country of Elon-obsessed kids who didn't have friends in high school and are going to just take it out on the rest of the world.

And that, to me, there's something more fundamental.

You know, you kind of cover what's happening on the surface of Trump.

What does it mean about us as a country that this is just something that is happening in this country?

And I think the rest of the world is going to look at that and they're going to draw their own conclusions.

And their own conclusions are not going to be like, like, yes, you know, doge intern, like go stick it to the people that save lives around the world.

I know.

I'm torn here too.

Look, the half of my brain is the guy who does this show on Tuesday and who's read the long ProPublica piece about USAID cuts in Sudan and the development workers who are having to decide whether to do what they were told by the U.S.

government and let babies die.

or lose their jobs and keep treating those babies for as long as they can.

And I think that is like profound and important and the kind of story that will actually move people.

And the other half of my brain does Pods of America on Monday and reads a bunch of polling and knows that Americans think Dan Pfeiffer's in your ear.

Yeah, Dan Pfeiffer's screaming at me.

It's 2009 all over again.

And you and I are trying to get some comment in a speech and knows that Americans don't want to send money overseas for programs or any little incidents of waste or fraud or abuse is going to get lifted up and amplified, right?

Like Republicans are already out there trying to suggest that, you know, USAID money went to either their two kind of frames are either USAID is responsible for COVID existing or that it just spawns like

trans operas in various countries or whatever thing they think is sort of frivolous sounding.

And I'm like,

I mean, that's a literal, that's like an actual concept.

Is that a thing?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a good thing.

I can't wait for that.

The White House press secretary read it out.

And like, I don't know what the truth is.

And it's so frustrating.

And I think this stuff matters.

But I also like, I also remember the day after the Haiti earthquake, they sent sent in 2011, they sent me over to USAD to kind of try to help manage things.

And it took 10 hours and we couldn't get emails sent up for me and I had to come out.

So I know there's bureaucracy and things don't always work perfectly and it can be a mess, but it's still important.

You know, it's like a baby, don't throw the baby with the bathwater situation.

And figuring out how to fight this politically is hard.

I know.

I mean, and look, let me try to square this circle because, you know, you guys, I'm sure, are right on Potsdam America that if I were to ask for the first rally at the first government agency shut down by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, you'd probably send people to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because that hits people's pocketbooks, right?

But I think you can do both at the same time because I do think you can offer people a values proposition that goes above the trans operas and the, you know, the Hamas condoms or whatever.

Yeah, that's just made up, right?

Yeah, yeah.

To the point that it's interesting, you know, we've all kind of gone back and boned up on our UCID.

This was started in 1961.

So I got it wrong.

It was a DEI musical in Ireland.

There was some other thing confusing it with.

But like, you know, this, although I'm sorry, there was, apparently it was a trans opera in Columbia.

Anyway, we have no idea if this is real, but this is what the Republicans are saying the USAID does.

But they want...

They want a small debate, and maybe we should have a bigger debate.

They want the debate to be about very small things like these programs.

And we somehow think we win these debates when we prove that they're lying about the programs.

When there should be a bigger point about like, what is this country and what does it stand for?

It's interesting to me that USAID was founded in 1961.

That was the height of the Kennedy Corps.

That was John F.

Kennedy, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

We need to be in all these places.

He started the Peace Corps.

And people were really proud, you know, to be American at that time.

They felt better about being America when we were creating USAID than I think people feel about America today that it's being destroyed, right?

And so I think there's a way to try to go above the, certainly the DEI opera or musical or whatever it is, but even above, and again, I love, I think Chris Murphy's been the best Democrat since the Trump election.

But to, and I've said, because I've said all the same shit he did, to even go above that and just be like, what kind of country are we?

You really want to be a country that doesn't care if there's a famine somewhere and does nothing about it.

And

the short-term answer may be yes.

But I think we have to change.

Yeah, if you don't make the argument, you don't have to convince anyone.

Well, can I play for you a counterpoint then?

Marco Rubio did a press conference where he actually blamed the aid groups for the confusion.

Let's listen to that.

I issued a blanket waiver that said if this is life-saving programs, okay, if it's providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you're not included in the freeze.

I don't know how much more clear we can be than that.

And I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization.

Or I wonder whether they're deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point.

Take that

nurse providing

ARVs to a child with HIV in Sudan.

First of all, Marco showed you.

Yeah, he's lying.

They did freeze life safe.

I mean, landmines we talked about, right?

They freeze this aid, then they walked it back, then they changed it again.

Like they've created mass mass confusion.

And also, he doesn't even know.

He probably had no idea that this was happening with USAID.

He probably found out he was in charge of USAID in a press release, you know.

I mean, that guy could not be further out of the loop.

You know, so it wouldn't surprise me if we're on this podcast and Fears talking about Marco losing his security detail or something, you know.

But, but so I mean, there is a to

focus on what people's grievances have been with USAID, it's often been that there's some waste there because USCID does a lot of business with contractors.

And so there's like a delta between the amount of money that is allocated and the amount of money that reaches people.

And there's overhead, too.

Yeah, and there's overhead.

And Samantha Power spent a lot of time trying to kind of narrow that gap.

That would be a worthy way of looking at this.

There's also, it is a weird structure in the sense that you had the State Department, then USCID created as an independent agency, then Republicans, and mainly George Bush, created PEPFAR within the state, created the Millennium Challenge Accounts, which is this kind of separate entity that administers grants to countries.

But look,

part of what is happening here is Trump is trying to capture, you want to talk about Marxism.

He's trying to capture the means of production for the government.

He's trying to capture all the money that the government controls so that it kind of is answerable only to him and not to Congress.

That's what this is really about, the consolidation of power.

And that's, I think, what we have to keep our eye on.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, and I wanted to take this idea seriously, too, whether a USAID should be merged with state or part of state.

And there's probably some people thinking, well, why doesn't that make more sense?

I mean, why wouldn't that be more efficient?

Development assistance is key to our diplomacy.

Coordinating better might entail being under the same roof.

You could probably save some money.

And the counter argument to that.

to this pitch to sort of merge USAID and state is that it's just easier said than done.

And there's actually a precedent of this kind of merger that we can look at that did not go well, which was the merger of an agency called the U.S.

Information Agency or USIA into the State Department in 1999.

So USIA, and you have a lot of expertise with this, Ben.

You should talk about your global engagement.

USIA was the leading public diplomacy element in the U.S.

government throughout the Cold War.

They promoted kind of the U.S.

values and economic system, and it was apparently quite effective.

And the advocates for the merger of USIA into the State Department said it would save money, improve coordination,

make the agency more effective.

But years later, I mean, I read this report from the Heritage Foundation, which supports merging USAID into state, who said that this

merger of USIA into the State Department was a disaster.

And the reason was you have this agency that does public diplomacy that gets picked apart, it gets put into different components of the State Department, and it's never prioritized.

You got like kind of orphan elements all over state.

That includes, and then you have State Department leaders picking whether to fund public diplomacy or the stuff they actually care about and know how to do.

And obviously, they're going to choose, you know, the thing that they're used to working on, the, you know, funding for the ambassador versus public diplomacy Monday.

It downgraded the leadership of public diplomacy.

It took away a clear agency's purpose and kind of made it.

jammed it into the State Department and its culture, which is risk-averse and slow and secretive.

And basically, long story short, hobbled this public diplomacy effort right before 9-11 when we really could have used it.

So it's just, it's not as simple as it looks on like a McKinsey org chart.

That's exactly right.

You summarized the USAIA piece perfectly, which is public diplomacy, and I tried on this for eight years, but it's just vastly deprioritized at state.

You don't get ahead in your career by becoming a public diplomacy officer at the State Department.

There's always going to be a crisis or a government-to-government relationship that is is going to command the attention of the Secretary of State and the senior leadership of the State Department more than some public diplomacy program.

So you basically kind of created a stepchild that was never prioritized and therefore never did as well as anybody wanted.

And every now and then, great programs emerged or really innovative people emerged.

But nobody would argue that the mission of public diplomacy was improved by that consolidation.

And the same is true on USAID.

That's a different skill set.

The ability to administer a foreign assistance program, to surge resources into a conflict zone, to surge health resources into an epidemic zone, that's different than an ambassador going into to negotiate a bilateral relationship.

Or learning five languages to serve in Jordan.

Yeah, exactly.

And there's another piece of it, which

is...

probably a harder political sell, but it's what I would always hear from the USAID people.

When the State Department shows up, everybody thinks, well, they're just showing up because there's some political interest behind what they're advocating.

Whereas USAID is supposed to be these people that show up with a different mission.

That's the brand we slap on stuff.

Yeah, we're here to give you...

food.

We're here to end the famine.

And yes, that accrues to the America's benefit in all the ways we talked about, but it was meant to be seen as a, you know, if a USAID,

I don't know if we can say vaccines anymore now that RFK Jr.

is on a path to confirmation, but USAID did a lot of polio vaccination around the world, which has saved untold lives and been good for us too, because it's better to knock out these diseases.

If a State Department officer shows up to vaccinate you, it's different than like a healthcare worker with a box that has USAID on it, you know?

And none of this really matters to the Doge gang, but it will transform how people interact with the U.S.

government in lots of places.

Yeah, they don't care about this history.

They don't care about the context.

They just, well, we're just AI in it all.

Yeah.

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The USAID is the only agency getting gutted here, Ben.

There's lots of attorneys at DOJ, at the Department of Justice, who worked on prosecutions of Trump, who are being forced out.

And last week, eight top executives at the FBI were fired.

And then over the weekend, the FBI director told, the acting FBI director told staff that the Trump administration is looking for the names of every single agent who worked on the January 6th investigations.

And apparently, thousands of FBI staffers were sent some sort of questionnaire or survey about their involvement in those investigations, despite the fact that those agents don't don't get to choose what they work on.

They're just assigned things.

All of this is happening before Trump's FBI director nominee Cash Patel has been confirmed.

And on Tuesday, a group of nine FBI agents asked a federal judge to block these data collection efforts, but we'll see if that works.

It's hard to read this stuff and not feel like we're kind of sliding it to the worst case autocratic police state nightmare.

Yeah, I mean, we're two weeks in here.

And again, what are the most fundamental kind of, if you strip government down to its essence, what is the fundamental power of government?

It's the monopoly on violence.

That's the U.S.

military.

That's now led by Pete Hegseth.

It's the monopoly on justice, and that's the FBI and the DOJ about to be led by Cash Patel and Pam Bondi.

And that's spending money.

And we see, you know, that's Elon Musk controlling all the payment system.

So this is a part of a...

very tried and true autocratic playbook to to seize and capture the most powerful organs of the state and use them for your own purposes.

And, you know,

it's not that unusual for a new president, for instance, to appoint new U.S.

attorneys.

But they're now FBI.

These are cops, you know,

and

it's not just that they're firing those people for things that those people probably didn't even get to choose what case they're assigned to.

It's a message that they're sending.

If you want to get ahead in your career, you have to be fully with the program.

So

it's a deterrent effect.

It's a messaging effect as well as what it's done.

And my question for you, Tommy, is like, if this is what they do before Cash Patel gets in there.

Can you imagine?

What do you think is coming when

our guy cash is in there?

It's a little worrisome.

Yeah.

It may connect to our El Salvador conversation a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, boy, imagine if some FBI agent is listening in on a bad actor and picks up some information about a bribe being given to a Trump administration person.

Do you think they're going to pursue that?

That's exactly the point about this deterrent effect, right?

Not at all.

Yeah.

If you you fired everybody who was involved in any Trump investigation, you're saying if Elon Musk is like robbing a bank, literally,

you probably are not going to be the guy to go arrest him because you know that's the end of your career.

You'll get doged.

Good stuff.

Just for the lawyers, like

he's not currently robbing a bank.

That's a hypothetical.

Yeah, hypothetically, if he were to rob a bank via the new treasury account access he has the link.

Maybe he doesn't need to rob a fucking treasury vendor.

He can mint that trillion-dollar coin.

Okay, so in other parts of the government, Rubio took his first overseas trip.

He went to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.

Rubio's focus so far seems to be on immigration and then belligerent Woodrow Wilson era imperialism.

The first stop was Panama.

There, Rubio repeated Trump's attacks about the Panama Canal, Rubio's comments.

He was demanding quote immediate changes to push back on Chinese, quote, influence and control over the Panama Canal.

That was covered as a threat by most Western media outlets, correctly in my view.

But Panamanian president Jose Raul Molino just kind of brushed them off, saying he didn't view Rubio's comments as a threat and downplayed the concern about the U.S.

taking back control of the Panama Canal through some sort of coercion.

I asked one of our smart Latin America expert friends about the kind of disparity between this obviously being a threat and the president brushing it off.

And this person told me when Molino surrenders, he wants it to look like it wasn't at the point of a gun.

So everyone's doing their politics here.

But for those who care about the facts, Ben, the Chinese do not control the Panama Canal.

It's administrated by a Panamanian entity called the Panama Canal Authority.

But there's two ports at each end of the canal that are run by a Hong Kong-based company called C.K.

Hutchinson Holdings.

And Rubio says Trump is worried that those ports could block the flow of ships through the Panama Canal if the Chinese went hard in a trade war.

So that's

their stated thinking here.

Then Rubio went to El Salvador to meet with the self-described world's coolest dictator and Bitcoin enthusiast Naibukele.

Their meeting focused on immigration.

As we discussed last week, I think El Salvador has been floated as a destination for Trump to send migrants that he deports from the U.S., especially Venezuelans.

But shit got weird when Bukele pitched a plan for the U.S.

to outsource part of our own prison system and send prisoners from the U.S., including American citizens, to El Salvador to be held in their mega-prison industrial complex.

Rubio called this offer, quote, an act of extraordinary friendship.

And he said that, quote, no country has ever made an offer of friendship such as this.

Maybe there's a reason for that, Marco.

Ben, I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this Panama trip or any other part of Rubio's mission you're overseas.

But I do think we should spend some time on this El Salvador prison offer because it is nuts.

But kick us off.

Yeah, I want to start with Panama because because I saw the same thing, which is that

the Rubio didn't say much in Panama himself, and it was like some State Department spokesperson.

I think the State Department spokesperson who called him Lil Marco, maybe or something, or I don't know.

Some State Department spokesman issued the kind of threatening language, and it reminded me, I actually have interacted with Marco Rubio a number of times, and most of those interactions took place after I negotiated the cube opening that Marco Rubio absolutely hated, right?

And I remember going to meet with him the first time and having and thinking it would be this horrible meeting and he was going to yell at me or something.

And we had a very pleasant conversation for a very long time.

It was almost like an hour or something.

And he was a personable guy.

You know, he asked

questions.

You know, he made clear he didn't agree, but we were trying to find things that we could work together on.

And then he goes out and absolutely blasts us.

Nice.

Right.

Of course.

And actually he called me

to give me a heads up when Trump did his first policy changes, which I thought was very nice.

I mean, I was out of government.

And I actually

thought it was so nice that I said to him, hey, you know, like if you ever need me, you know, obviously I have relationships in Cuba.

If you ever, if there's, you know, we need to send a message, you know, I was just trying to think of something to say because he had this gesture.

And then that appeared in like a free beacon or Breitbart story a couple hours later.

The reason I'm telling these stories.

Ben Rhodes offers to see.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was making fun of me and stuff.

The reason I'm telling these stories is I would guess that Marco Rubio was not tough with the president of Panama.

I would guess that he was very solicitous, very nice, that that meeting was very calm.

And then they go out and then have like some press officer issue the threat.

This is the Marco Rubio that I would anticipate.

I do not think that guy is tough in the room.

I think he's super tough when his plane takes off.

And, you know, that tells you all you need to know about just how much these guys are going to stand up to dictators and stuff like that.

Or Trump.

Yeah.

And then the El Salvador thing, we've covered Bukele.

These prisons are, you know, human rights organizations have reported mass kind of indiscriminate detentions.

There's been allegations of torture and disappearances.

He's basically set up this kind of gulag system to deal with security challenges, but also to kind of consolidate power.

And the idea, I mean, again, only in 2025 has the world changed to the point that it's a positive to meet with a dictator and to then celebrate as a gesture of magnanimity that the dictator will offer to imprison Americans in their

destitute prisons.

I mean, it's so crazy that this is like a normal thing that would happen in 2025, but

Marco Rubio used to criticize dictators.

I guess not if they are the world's coolest of them.

Yeah.

Earlier today I talked.

And if they speak at CPAC.

Right.

If you're a Bitcoin dictator with a backwards hat.

Earlier today, I talked to the guy named Noah Bullock, who is the El Salvador executive director of a human rights organization called Crystalsol.

Noah, by the way, was my next-door neighbor from when I was one until maybe four years old.

His sister was my best friend as a kid.

No way.

Their father was the Episcopal minister at our church, and then he got reassigned and they moved to New York.

So I never saw them again.

But it was like my literally best friend and this guy And we're talking from El Salvador.

It's crazy.

Smallest of small world things.

But he was just, he was telling me, I mean, I'd read about it, but hearing him describe the scale of the mass incarceration operations in El Salvador really is unbelievable.

I mean, I think roughly 2% of the total population of the country is currently in jail.

A lot of them were imprisoned after Bukeley declared what he called a state of exception, which meant he suspended a whole lot of constitutional rights.

So in practice, what you have, as you mentioned, is the mass roundup of young men.

There's show arrests for the cameras, and they're thrown in jail without being charged for anything, maybe sometimes years at a time.

When they are charged, it's almost always for association with a group, not for an actual crime.

You're just associated with a gang in some way.

You have no access to defense attorneys, and it seems like what they think might come next is mass trials.

of hundreds, if not a thousand, two thousand people at a time.

So on top of that, as you mentioned, there's systematic torture in these prisons.

People are being depicted.

No one's talking about rehabilitation.

You are in jail for life.

So,

like, big picture, Bukeley is propping up this authoritarian state and like cult of personality built on the back of this mass incarceration effort.

And he keeps arresting more and more people, like setting another target of another 10,000 or 20,000 and 30,000 without letting anyone out.

So, now he has to find a way to fund it.

So,

the IMF is telling him you have to make all these cuts.

So, he's cutting teachers, he's cutting hospital workers while expanding the military, but running to the U.S.

and saying, hey, for some cash, I'll take some of your prisoners.

And just the idea of like sending American citizens, I don't care what they did, into a transnational gulag to prop up this Bitcoin fucking dictator is insane.

And I was asking him, I was like, well, isn't there like horrific violence within these prisons among the population?

And he said, actually, the only silver lining of this is there's relatively little violence, but the reason is that they starve them.

So people are too tired to harm each other.

It is like

this could not be more fucked up.

I mean, again, the rest of the world, you know, we may think that this is, you know, Joe Broari, part of the Trump show, but the rest of the world is going to see America subsidizing and backing this kind of

prison system.

And look, I just think it's also a warning.

Trump likes that system, system, right?

And we talked about the Lake and Riley bill, which a lot of Democrats voted for, in which there's no due process.

And that's what you described that Bukele does, rolling people up by association.

That's kind of how Trump talks about anyone who's an immigrant in this country, you know.

And so you can see a slippery slope here

to

people suddenly losing due process, people suddenly finding them on planes to prisons like that.

People who are undocumented and not Salvadorian, who did nothing wrong finding their way into one of Bukele's prisons.

An American who maybe did do something wrong, but we didn't used to deport our own criminals to other countries finding their way there.

So you have to see this both as the kind of scary thing that it is, but also even scarier as like indicative of the kind of system that Trump likes.

And for a Rubio, who again came onto the scene as one of these kind of McCain-like human rights, you know, defending hawks,

what a come down.

His first trip to, you know, as Secretary of State, he's going to like El Salvador and praising, you know, gulags.

And a lot of the rejoinder you hear to criticisms of Bukeley is that, well, he's the most popular leader in Latin America.

And that is true.

But you have to talk about the context through which that popularity arises, which is he controls all the media.

He dominates social media.

They've rounded up 86,000 people arbitrarily.

and everyone knows you could be next.

There's political prisoners.

I mean, this is a lot like Putin's Russia.

And so you'll see, you know, Bukele will have 80% approval in these polls, but 65% of the population is afraid to talk about politics.

And those things are, those things are connected because no one, there's no other political party.

Like everyone is afraid to express an opinion that could lead to reprisal from the government.

And let's see where that popularity is in like five and 10 years.

Right.

When a lot of people who've been put in prison wrongly have not been released, when the corruption sets in and the economy, people start to see the grift in it.

There's a bit of a sugar high to

rolling up every gang member, 10x innocent people, and it just seems like crime is down.

And thinking, well, my brother or sister or cousin who got arrested, well, surely they'll be out soon because there must have been some kind of mistake.

Well, they're not getting out.

And so

I would expect that that popularity is not durable, but we'll see.

Yeah.

And again, we're not trying to discount the importance of security.

I mean, if your neighborhood went from filled with gangs in the streets, people getting shot to relatively safe, I'm sure you're genuinely grateful and happy about that.

The question is, how did that come about?

Was it because Bukay cut a bunch of deals with these gangs to kind of hide what they're doing?

Because there's a lot of allegations that that's what happened.

And to your point, I mean, how this wears over five, 10, 15 years when he's just locking more and more people up is a big question.

We're going to take a quick break, Ben.

But there's a lot of rage bait out there in the news right now.

You might have noticed.

It's meant to overwhelm us, enrage us.

So today we're going to focus on something a little more positive, which is the work being done to fight back.

This month, Vote Save America is making donations as part of their anxiety relief program to black-led organizations and candidates of color, helping us gain ground at the state and local level.

Candidates like Janelle Bynum, Oregon's first black Congress member who won her district by less than 12,000 votes in 2024, and is in a must-win race that could determine whether Democrats can win back the House.

Set up a recurring donation at any amount that feels right to you, you, and Vote Save America.

We'll use it to build progressive power in 2025 and beyond.

Go to votesaveamerica.com slash donate to donate now.

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Also, if you're looking for like guidance for how to talk about this stuff, check out Dan Pfeiffer's message box.

It's got great tight tips and

summaries of what's going on in the world, what actually matters, how to think about it.

I love MessageBook.

I read it every day or every day that it's out.

Crooked.com yes we dan.

You get a 30-day free trial, Ben.

All right.

Yes, we Dan.

Tommy, I have one plug here.

How is Oregon, by the way?

Fantastic.

Great crowds.

Some Worldos were there.

People heard about it on the show, so that was great.

This week, continuing my strange tour,

I'm going to your neck of the woods.

Where?

I'm going to talk to some SMAT kids at Harvard.

Oh, nice.

What is it?

Kennedy School?

No.

This isn't just Kennedy School.

This is, you know, it's for, it's at the Psy Auditorium at Harvard on Thursday afternoon.

And then I'm doing, I am doing some stuff with some Kennedy School people too.

Cool.

And seeing, catching up with some friends.

So I'll be in Boston if anybody wants to come out there.

Well, you did pick the perfect time to go to Boston, which is February 6th.

Yeah, yeah.

I was thinking about getting, I love to run on the river there.

And I was kind of thinking that I probably will not.

Let's actually look this up.

This is some live podcasting.

My mom might go to this.

We'll see what the Boston weather is looking like.

You know, it's only low in the 18 degrees.

18.

That's not Los Angeles.

That's cool.

Are you doing like a Q ⁇ A or are you going to give a speech?

Both.

I'm going to talk a little bit, answer some questions.

Nice.

Hang it out.

That'll be fun.

Go see Ben.

Bring him Boston things,

beans, chowder, chowder, and then psychedelics.

Yeah.

Anytime.

Bring an edgy Irish cousin.

Yeah.

What is more boss?

Yeah, you're a guy from Charlestown or something here.

From the town.

Beat up the New York.

We'll go knock off the female park.

This is for 86.

How you like them apples?

I wish I was going.

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Then speaking of transnational gulags, Gitmo is back in the news.

The OG transnational

gulag.

Trump wants to deport 30,000 migrants to Gitmo.

Why not?

On Tuesday, the White House Press Secretary confirmed that the first deportation flight carrying about a dozen people to Gitmo to Cuba was on its way.

Usually, when we talk about Gitmo, we talk about the detention of post-9/11 prisoners, terrorism suspects, many who are tortured, many who are wrongly detained.

But Gitmo has also been used to temporarily detain asylum seekers picked up at sea, including during the Biden administration.

And there's a darker history there of Caribbean migrants from Haiti and Cuba being held at Gitmo in the 1990s.

This idea is nuts logistically.

I mean, for a million reasons, it's nuts.

The New York Times had a long report on this proposal and the logistics.

There's 15 prisoners currently at the Guantanamo Bay Prison.

They're being held in two buildings with about 275 cells.

There's not like a ton of infrastructure, existing infrastructure available to house people.

Pete Hegsaff, the Secretary of Defense, suggested you could put tents up on the golf course to house another 6,000 deportees.

There's a Marine general quoted in this time story who said in the 90s at its peak, the camp held 25,000 migrants, mostly Cubans.

I think it was just people outside in tents.

But getting people to Gitmo requires very expensive military flights and they have to ship in all the clothing, all the food, water.

I mean, it's like, it's going to be unbelievably expensive, logistically stupid.

And obviously, Gitmo is a...

moral stain on the history of our country, which explains why Trump probably likes the idea.

Yeah, the the Dogebros could go down there to find some waste because it's far more per prisoner to keep Gitmo open.

What I find interesting about this, because you point out the absurdity of it, so just to add another point, for all the

self-flagellation that we've been doing as Democrats about we became too oppositional just to Trump and what do we stand for?

And

they're absolutely driven by

things

that people like you and I were upset about.

Like in other words,

liberals didn't like Gitmo because America tortured people there and it became a symbol of all the excesses of the war on terror.

And it's like, because we didn't like it, we're going to put 30,000 people there.

Exactly.

You know, this is what is so strange to me is that they're the ones obsessed with us, you know, and like we have no power.

You won, guys.

You guys won.

I'm a loser.

Yeah, we're total losers.

That's all I got.

We got a podcast.

And it's like we're gonna put 30 000 people in gitmo to own these libs you know they they will never reach the end of owning us you know um it serves no purpose it's expensive it's horrible for a reputation in the world it's absurd that there even is this like prison in cuba that we control and and and yet precisely because it's maximally offensive like that's the only that's the only reason to do it you know there's not any other reason to do it no and and that that there's something so dark and strange about that.

And yet it is kind of the beating heart of MAGA.

It's just to kind of stick it to us.

Own the libs and inflict pain and cruelty and suffering on random people.

On vulnerable people, and all the better if they're not white.

People of color, yeah.

A few more things, Ben, before we get to the kind of Netanyahu section of this.

By the way, can you imagine,

and I'm going to say this in a comic way, but it's like tragic comic.

Imagine being one of these detainees in Getmo.

I was thinking about that too.

The 15 guys who've been there for 20 years who are like, what is happening?

All of a sudden, there's 30,000 people.

What happened to the fucking golf course?

Who is it?

Who's there?

It's like KSM.

The worst fucking people.

Maybe it'll become like some horrible terrorist army.

I don't know.

Well,

I mean, yeah.

There are security questions.

I mean, if you're just creating a giant camp with, as Trump says, the worst of the worst, trende Aragua gang members.

Like, it seems unsafe.

Anyway,

it's one to watch.

A couple more things.

So, Ben, over the weekend, the Trump administration took some airstrikes into Somalia that they said target an ISIS leader.

Trump even posted a video of one of the airstrikes on Truth Social, I believe.

So, it's good to see that we are ending the forever wars.

Also, the State Department named a new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

This is the role that is the leader on America's public diplomacy abroad out of state.

And it was given to a right-wing journalist named Darren Beatty.

Now, it's really, it's hard to overstate how extreme and ill-suited this guy is to this job.

In 2018, Beatty was fired from the first Trump administration for speaking at a conference tied to white nationalists.

Back we cared about those kinds of things.

Now we sponsor them.

Now we sponsor them

through state.

A website he founded concocted the theory that January 6th was an FBI-led inside job.

And he tweets things like the following, quote, competent competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.

Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.

So congrats on your new team, Marco Rubia.

Yeah, these guys really don't like women.

There's kind of a through line there

across the board.

And just

it's just a complete prizing of ideology over any any other possible qualification.

And also, to your point, to continue the Rubio theme,

like he's clearly not choosing any of his own people.

It's like he's just some guy there who flies around and they stack the State Department with white nationalists and they gut USCID and they write the press release after the Panama trip.

You know, it just feels like he's not exactly connected to what is happening in that building.

No, and I wonder who is.

And by the way, way, it seems like Tulsey Gabbert is going to get confirmed as DNI.

She passed out of the Intel Committee, got support from some key Republicans.

So there's just no boundaries.

I mean, I kind of thought maybe RFK Jr.

was going to be too much of a lib who supported abortion rights and that might stop him.

Nope.

No, not to be like a deep state simp, but like...

This guy, all these poor foreign service officers and civil servants will be supervised by this guy.

So imagine being a woman coming to work for this guy.

That's happening across the U.S.

government.

Yeah, or a person of color.

Or Marco Ruby.

Yeah,

a human man.

He's getting told by this dude that he's

just being copied.

He's in the way of white excellence.

Demoralizing honkies.

Anyway, so lastly, today, it's on Tuesday, February 4th.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is in town, the Israeli Prime Minister.

We missed him so much here.

Ben and I just paused the recording of the show to watch a couple clips clips from the little pool spray they did in the Oval Office.

They're sitting in two chairs in front of the fireplace.

Bibi's got what can only be described as a gigantic shit-eating grin on his face, Ben.

Yes.

Trump whined about how he'll never get a Nobel Peace Prize.

Netanyahu was asked whether Trump or Biden deserves credit for the hostage release and ceasefire deal.

You'll be shocked to hear he gave all the credit to

Mr.

Trump, said he's glad Mr.

Trump is here.

And then we wanted to play for you this rant from Trump about essentially ethnically cleansing Gaza and why Gazans would ever want to return home.

Here it is.

Would Palestinians have the right to return to Gaza if they left while the rebuilding was happening?

It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn't want to return.

Why would they want to return?

The place has been hell.

It's been one of the meanest, one of the meanest, toughest places on earth.

And right now,

I've seen every picture from every angle, better than if I were there.

And nobody can live there.

You can't live there.

So

if we can build them through massive amounts of money supplied by other people, very rich nations,

and they're willing to supply it.

If we can build something for them in one of the countries, and it could be Jordan, it could be Egypt, it could be other countries, and you could build build four or five or six areas it doesn't have to be one area but you take certain areas and you build really good quality housing like a beautiful town like someplace where they can live and not die because Gaza is a guarantee that they're going to end up dying the same thing is going to happen again It's happened over and over again, and it's going to happen again as sure as you're standing there, Peter.

So

I hope that we could do something where they wouldn't want to go back.

Who would want to go back?

They've experienced nothing but death and destruction.

So Ben, it does seem like no one's kidding around about this plan to ethnic cleanse Gaza.

I mean.

No.

And I think we have to pause and just remember, first of all,

this guy, Nanyao, has

been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

And that's how most of the world sees him, right?

And he's the first foreign visitor to the Trump White House.

And

so

Trump talks about how Gaza has been completely destroyed, right?

He's sitting next to the guy who destroyed it with help from Joe Biden in the form of weapons.

And just that, and that's not normal either.

It fits with what we were saying about their fixation on the libs and stuff.

Usually the first foreign trip is to Canada or Mexico, the first foreign visitors, Canada, Mexico.

Now, we threaten trade wars with them.

And it's not normal for the first foreign visitor to be the Israeli prime minister.

And that almost feels designed, it just shows how much politics have captured the Republican Party and Trump, and just even how nobody's even pointing out that that's unusual.

Right.

And also, the only foreign aid that's not cut off is to Israel and to Egypt to support Israel.

It shows you how much American identity politics kind of captured

American foreign policy because

this would not, this doesn't make sense in any other way, you know?

Now,

let's be clear too.

Like, he's literally just sitting there making a more aggressive case for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

We've talked about they don't want to leave Gaza.

The neighboring countries don't want them to leave Gaza.

They know if they leave Gaza, they'll never go back.

The people that want them to leave Gaza are like Ben Gavir and the most right-wing elements in the Israeli coalition because they want to settle Gaza and have it be part of Israel and ethnically cleanse it.

That's what's happening.

I mean, that's the President of the United States with his first foreign visitor endorsing the ethnic cleansing of a people.

And I mean, that's what happened.

Yeah, it's also worth, you know, I always read the kind of preview stories before Netanyahu visit because

there's very purposeful leaks.

And there's two I wanted to talk about.

The Washington Post talked about all the pressure on Netanyahu from the right wing of his coalition to not complete the ceasefire deal, to basically end it after this first phase, this first 42 days, and then resume fighting because people like Smotrich, the right-wing finance minister,

don't want the deal to go through.

They don't want the Israelis to ever leave Gaza.

And what that would mean in practice is that second tranche of male hostages doesn't get out.

And the IDF forces don't leave the Gaza Strip and things just return to how they were a few weeks ago,

which would would be a catastrophic

action for every human being in Gaza.

I mean, I think all the humanitarian aid would stop flowing into Gaza.

And then during this,

before Netanyahu came into the Oval, Trump did this little event with himself and his team where he signed some executive orders.

One of them was reimposing maximum pressure on Iran, going back to his strategy from the first administration.

And then I noticed there was an article in the New York Times about new intelligence the U.S.

has about Iranian scientists exploring a faster approach to developing nuclear weapons.

So it does seem like that was a bit of a pretext to get back to this maximum pressure strategy.

And I don't know, maybe you pick back up the conversations about military strikes on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

And then Trump signed a second EO withdrawing the U.S.

from UNRWA and the U.N.

Human Rights Council.

And that UNRWA withdrawal on top of the Israelis stopping cooperation with UNRWA makes you wonder how any humanitarian relief is going to get into Gaza if this war starts back up.

And I just, I don't know.

Aaron Ross Powell, we had the head of director of UNRWA in Gaza on a couple weeks ago, and he was saying that this UNRWA ban in Israel, if it's supplemented to by the U.S., will paralyze their ability to operate.

And if you think about it, the USAID cutoff has paralyzed the ability of USAID to deliver its part of the humanitarian ceasefire.

So if you're basically shutting down USAID and trying to shut down UNRWA,

you're not going to be able to keep the humanitarian part of the ceasefire terms.

I don't think that's going to keep Trump up at night.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is, you know,

which, by the way, is a hell of a pretext for that ethnic cleansing operation.

Yeah.

You know, they'll be like, well, we can't get any humanitarian relief into Gaza.

We got to get everybody out.

Yeah.

And what will happen is the most vulnerable people will probably leave and a bunch of Hamas fighters will stay and there'll be this guerrilla war for God knows how long.

Yes, absolutely.

And,

you know, the other thing is the people that like to throw around charges of anti-Semitism, you know, one of their

allegations essentially is don't claim that the U.S.

makes policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.

Well, one way to reinforce that impression is to sign your Iran policy on the eve of meeting with the Israeli prime minister.

Good point.

That's a good point.

I I mean, I think that we have an Iran policy that should be rooted in U.S.

interests, not an Iran policy that is like a housewarming gift to Bibi Nanya when he comes to visit.

And then the last thing I'd say is part of what worries me

about the Trump presidency vis-a-vis the Israeli right wing is if you are Smotrich or Bengavir, you are thinking we'll never have an opportunity like this.

We've got this guy in there for four years who doesn't give a shit about the Palestinians, doesn't give a shit about international opinion, is willing to break any international norm.

So if ever there was a time to depopulate Gaza or to annex the West Bank, we have to go now.

And so it incentivizes them to push Netanyahu harder to break the ceasefire or to do something in Gaza or the West Bank that they wouldn't do with even a Joe Biden in there, give them a pretty blank check.

And by the way, If you're an Iranian scientist, the Trump presidency is a time where you might be like, shit, man, maybe we need a nuclear weapon.

You know, like all these other countries are going to make these judgments based on the

extreme nature of Trump and

what does that lead them to do?

That's always been a concern of mine.

Yeah, this is a scary one and just the beginning.

And, you know, I guess we're counting on Steve Witkoff to keep the ceasefire on track.

Steve Witkoff, by all accounts, seems to really support a two-state solution.

So I don't know.

Let's get Witkoff out front and center.

I don't know.

That guy has some juice, and Trump is disinterested, and maybe he can keep this thing on track.

But I'm not all that hopeful.

Okay,

Paze the World listeners.

It is now 7.30 p.m.

Eastern.

Trump just finished his press conference with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

What we played for you earlier was part of what's called a pool spray.

So that is when the two leaders sit down in the Oval Office.

Often the press staff brings in the reporters briefly.

They get some images and photos.

Sometimes they shot a few questions, which you guys heard Trump and Netanyahu answer.

Then they had their meeting.

They were one-on-one in the Oval or wherever it was.

And then they went to a different part of the White House for an official press conference.

That press conference just wrapped.

And here is a clip that we wanted to play for you guys.

And by the way, this is just Tommy Solo because Ben had to go home to pick up his kids.

But we thought that this

announcement that Donald Trump just made was shocking enough that we needed to do an addendum to the podcast to make sure you heard it.

The U.S.

will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too.

We'll own it.

I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East.

And everybody I've spoken to, this was not a decision made lightly.

Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.

So yes, you just heard what you think you heard.

Donald Trump says the United States is going to take over the Gaza Strip and occupy it.

Trump was asked whether this was a temporary thing or long-term, and he said that the U.S.

is going to take a long-term ownership position of Gaza.

I guess he's viewing this as a building or an asset.

Trump was asked if he would send U.S.

troops to Gaza as part of this annexation process.

And he said, quote, if it's necessary, we'll do that.

We're going to take over that peace and we're going to develop it.

So for everyone keeping score at home here, Trump has now said the United States should annex Gaza, Greenland, potentially the Panama Canal.

He keeps joking about Canada becoming the 51st state and a joke that I guess is sounding more serious every single day.

So I guess this is America first foreign policy.

This is restraint.

This is Trump honoring his pledge to end wars and not get U.S.

troops involved in conflicts overseas.

That's what we're seeing here.

So I don't know.

I wish Ben was here because

I just sort of have my jaw on the table here.

I'm going to be very interested to see what the international reaction to this announcement is.

You have to imagine it will not be well received in most capitals on the so-called Arab street.

You can imagine a lot of right-wing Israelis being angry about the idea of the U.S.

controlling a territory that a lot of them think should be part of Israel.

And then, of course, I mean, it goes without saying that people in Gaza, people in the West Bank, they are going to fight this idea tooth and nail.

I mean, Gaza is their home.

2 million people live there.

Gaza is a part of what has long been envisioned as a future Palestinian state.

The idea that...

People in Gaza just want to live there because they have no other option is bullshit.

It is patronizing and dishonest and wrong.

This is someone's home.

This is home to millions of people.

And Donald Trump just announced that the U.S.

is going to push them all out of it and redevelop it and then own it in perpetuity.

So I don't know.

It's a long ways, I guess, from this announcement to this actually happening.

But this was, I don't get shocked that often by things Donald Trump says.

I was...

thought it was shocking enough for the United States president to announce a policy of ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, but now I guess we're planning to occupy it.

So that's why we broke back into the show, why it's just me solo, and why we wanted to update you on all of this.

And I'm sure we'll cover it more next week.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Usra Elbagir, who's a Sky News Africa correspondent.

She has been in the DRC recently covering the conflict there with M23.

So you'll want to hear that interview.

So stick around.

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Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by Yustra Al-Bagir, who is the Africa correspondent for Sky News and has been covering, including on the ground, the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Yusra, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

I want to just start by giving people an update on where things stand, and then we'll go back and talk a bit about how we got here.

But what is your latest understanding of what is happening on the ground?

I know there's been talk from M23 about a ceasefire,

but what is your understanding of where things stand?

I mean, as it stands, bodies are being recovered.

At least 900 people were killed in just those five days of fighting during the takeover of Goma.

And at least 2,900 were injured.

But we're expecting that number to rise.

I mean, it's a bit of a cleanup operation from what I'm seeing.

There's still that kind of shock of what's happened over a very short period of time.

M23 are positioning themselves as a de facto governing body.

They've said that they want to set up a local administration.

I mean, we spoke to the general of that area when we left, and he was very much putting forward this

presentation of them being

following IHL, though he mistakenly called it IHR,

apologizing for the mess that we were witness to and saying, you know how it is.

We're fighting for our survival, and this is what happens with war, unfortunately.

So there is a kind of

this, I'd say, PR campaign happening, trying to make M23 look like they could govern Goma, they could replace the Congolese state.

But as this is happening, reports are coming out that they're actually moving south to South Kivo now.

and that they're reinforcing their positions in South Kivu and that they might be kind of descending on Bokavu, the capital of South Kivo, in a similar way that they took over Goma.

They're very ambitious.

I would be surprised if they were stopping at Goma, though with Goma, they now have kind of the heart of North Kivo, of the Eastern DRC,

which borders Rwanda, their backers, but also the country where they want to funnel out the resources.

So, you know, they've been making some gains over the last few months in the countryside.

Goma was obviously a dramatic escalation.

What is your sense of why this is happening now?

Was it opportunistic?

Was this a decision taken by M23, by Rwanda?

Why are we watching this kind of emergence of M23 again?

I mean, it depends on who you ask.

M23 will say they're fighting for their survival.

They're fighting for their, you know, the existential threat of the Congolese state supporting FDLR, which is militias born out of the same militias that carried out the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis.

Rwanda will say that they're securing their border, that they're preserving the integrity,

the sovereign integrity of their state.

But I mean, it really does just feel like a land grab.

It feels like it's all about money at a time where the EU, by signing a memorandum of understanding with Rwanda, an agreement to use Rwandan resources for clean energy in Europe

when Rwanda doesn't have any resources.

So I think there was a lot of complicity

from Europe around what Rwanda was doing through M23 in plain sight, this kind of, you know, consistent seizing of territory, seizing of mining territory.

And just before we went to Goma, I was speaking to a close colleague who's, you know, worked in the DRC for decades.

And we spoke about the significance of Goma.

And the question was, they've been engaging in economic war.

Why would they want Goma?

And he argued that Goma isn't,

they don't need Goma and they probably won't take it because of the backlash.

But arriving in Goma and speaking to senior Monesco colonels, They made it very clear that Goma is,

it's the symbolic move.

It's to show that they are here to stay.

Through Goma, they have access to the border with Rwanda, but they also have access to an international airport.

They want the heart of the region.

They're not going to just take the mines.

They've already got the mines, but I think they do actually want to set up a de facto state.

And for people who don't follow this that closely, what are the resources we're talking about in terms of the mining resources, the resources that Rwanda would want to cut out, the resources that Europe wants to import?

Well, we've got the three Ts,

tin, tantalum, tungsten, but we've also got cobalt.

The European demand for the 3T supply chain really comes down to electric cars and microchips.

And that's one of the things that had been driving campaigns,

social media campaigns around the Congo, was that our iPhones are a part of this conflict supply chain.

Electric vehicles are involved in this conflict supply chain.

That everyone is kind of turning away from the suffering and the mass displacement and the huge humanitarian repercussions of our own consumption.

That's, you know, I think that point had been made very early on last year, but also we saw lawsuits against big tech in the US be thrown out of court.

And then recently we've seen those lawsuits be enlivened from France and Belgium trying to make the point that there's an issue with the supply chain, that these minerals are coming from mines where not only are they captured through war, but it's also children, child miners have been well documented in these mines.

You've got horrific conditions for artisanal miners.

But also a UN panel of experts report said that they make, M23 make $800,000 a month.

on taxes in mining areas.

So it's this, it almost feels like a criminal syndicate.

I mean, they're making money from

in so many different ways around these mines and Rubaya is home to one of the largest cobalt mines in the world.

It's just incredibly rich.

So again, with the EU signing this agreement with Rwanda February 2024, came as a huge shock to mineral experts in Europe because there was no way the trade data, Rwanda's trade data, could stand up an agreement where they're basically saying Rwanda is going to supply Europe with all these resources for their clean, sustainable future.

And in return, giving Rwanda 750, around 750 million pounds, we'd say 900 Euro million fund from their global gateway strategy that the EU set up as an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative.

But, you know, I've been speaking to experts about this.

And one thing that sticks is

even though now there's pressure, especially from Belgian members of the European Parliament, you know, centre-right and even, you know, centre-right left-wing members of the European Parliament for this deal to be suspended, this deal with Rwanda, the problem is there will always be buyers of conflict minerals.

And I think the concern is that even if there's this pressure for the EU to suspend this deal, Rwanda could just turn to China and have those minerals sold to the Chinese.

So Rwanda, I think, is in a position where

they've got access, they've got a proxy force, and they've also got a sense of almost a moral justification from the genocide that they are using to say we are protecting Tutsis,

whether they're Congolese or Rwandan, by supporting M23.

And when you were in Goma and talking to people, where has the Congolese state been, the Congolese armed forces, presumably, you know, obviously this is their territory.

What happened to the security forces and the authority of the Congolese state?

And what are they trying to do to deal with this growing presence of M23?

It's incredibly fractured.

And I mean, we were there as senior FARDC, that's the Congolese Armed Forces commanders, fled by ferry.

They were fleeing over Lake Kivu en masse in boats until M23.

Then, when they had enough control, banned movement over the lake.

We, you know, the few military, senior military commanders that we met, one of them was kind of their head of media,

was just,

I mean, we asked if he could take us to the front line, and he looked at us like, even I don't want to go to the front line.

I mean, M23 were closing in really quickly.

And I think by the time we got there, everyone was, I mean, at that senior kind of top brass level, they were figuring out how they were going to extract themselves.

But there was,

there were pockets of resistance.

There was a group of around 350 special forces, Congolese forces, who were holding it down, holding down the fort.

They were fighting on Mount Goma with M23, and then they moved down and were fighting at street level.

Just as we saw masses of Congolese soldiers surrender as well.

And we just from outside our hotel, we could see them surrender at the UN peacekeeping base.

And then we'd come out to the roof when we could kind of pop our heads back up and see their fatigues on the road.

So

there was kind of at the lower levels, there was mass surrender from Congolese forces in Goma.

At the higher levels,

there was just senior commanders fleeing.

And then there was this group of special forces that were trying to at least put up a fight.

And what about the neighboring governments who've been involved in trying to

keep some modicum of stability or peace in the past?

I saw a war of words between President Kagame and Rwanda, President Rama Foso and South Africa.

Is it what is the role for the neighboring states?

And what is the current dynamic in terms of trying to prevent this from escalating further?

I mean, we've seen that Uganda and Burundi may get involved.

And Burundi

it seems clear which side would the Congolese state in fighting M23 because South Kivu is on Burundi's border, on their western border.

Uganda, it's interesting because I think traditionally Uganda would step in on the Congolese side, but I mean, you just read...

you read tweets by Museveni's son, who's like a complete, you know, a maverick.

And he's saying.

He's a Don Jr.

of Uganda, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Um,

Ruto, President Ruto of Kenya, is saying he wants to hold a summit, an extraordinary summit.

The Ruto has lost a lot of credibility with how he handled the protests in his own country.

And South, you know, Kagame and Ramaposa actually ended up having Twitter beef, which was shocking to everyone, where Kagame directly quote-tweeted Ramaposa after Ramaposa called the Randan Defence Forces a militia.

and Kagame had a lot to say about that.

So

it's concerning.

There does feel like a sense that it's spreading, but I also feel like there would be a lot of hesitation to engage multinationally and even regionally.

I mean, I could see Burundi getting involved and I can the proximity is enough for that.

I think Uganda's too split on on who to side with.

But in terms of South Africa and Rwanda, I mean, I think what happened here was that there was just such outrage around South African troops being killed

in a fight that isn't theirs, like a lot of outrage.

And I think the presidency and senior ministers here were responding to

a lot of hate towards Rwanda and a lot of anger towards the government.

But it felt very brash.

It didn't feel like a war cry.

And I think that tension, though, will be hard to dispel, considering how how far it's gone and the words that have been shared.

But

I mean, I think we regionally, there's an issue.

I wouldn't say, you know, cross-continentally, we'll see that kind of conflict play out on the ground.

I mean, so as you've described this, you know, nobody comes out looking particularly good in the sense that, you know, the Europeans are buying conflict minerals.

The Rwandans are obviously backing M23.

The region is trying to figure out where it stands.

I want to ask you about the people.

You were in Goma.

These people have been through endless cycles of violence,

brutal tactics.

M23 is known to use rape as a weapon of war.

What was the sense among the people that you spoke to about how they see things and what they want?

I mean, I think

the day before the takeover, even though it was imminent and they were approaching, there was a life as normal

vibe where that kind of battle-hardenedness or that sense of kind of they've been through this before or being jaded felt like it was there.

People were getting on with it.

It was just like busy roads.

There was no sense of hiding away.

I think people were still just continuing their life as normal until they couldn't, until they had to take cover for two days because of constant shelling and gunfire.

There was no electricity and there was no running water.

It had been switched off and the Congolese were saying it was M23 and the M23 were saying it was the Congolese government.

But I think there was definitely this rising dread underneath from when we landed in the airport.

I mean, even the way people were, you know, it wasn't even just the normal hustle and bustle of an airport.

There was a sense of like, everyone's just trying to get as much money as they can before things go bust.

The days that followed, we spent, I mean, we spent most of it in our hotel reporting from the hotel, and we were well positioned because we were very close to the border and we were also next to the UN peacekeeping base and downtown where the fighting was really bad.

But I think mostly I was reading,

you know, getting my cues off of the hotel staff.

And I think

there was just this sense of decorum and dignity and care through all of that.

But still

heartbreak, still a real sense of uncertainty.

I mean, you'd speak to one person and they'd say, We just want peace.

I think most of the people we, you know, we just want peace.

If it's M23, great.

If it's not, it's not.

But then when you speak to another person who's fed up with the Congolese government, its corruption, you know, the state capture, the fact that Congolese, the Congolese army and, you know, aligned militias are as guilty of committing atrocities as M23, fed up, happy for M23 to come in and clean up shop and see what happens next.

But the thing we kept hearing again and again is we just want peace.

There's just an element of it being so exhausting just just completely exhausting i mean 2020 2012 um goma was captured by m23 didn't last long and there was a peace deal that was brokered after that but this is the fifth time since the 90s since the genocide uh in rwanda that goma has been captured by Rwandan-backed rebels.

So not necessarily M23, but Rwandan-backed rebels.

And twice, two of those times during the Congo Wars, Rwanda invaded its neighbor, invaded the DRC.

So this is not new to them and these cycles keep happening, but definitely increasing in violence, increasing in

just

deprivation, a sense of desperation and honestly just...

hopelessness because they keep rebuilding and they keep making Jew and they keep finding ways through but at what cost?

And I think Rwanda is becoming much more brazen with its support in recent years of M23 and has the resources to do so considering its partnerships with different

Western governments.

And

Kagame has been called the West's favorite dictator for many years now.

And it's the people in the DRC who felt that on a very

real level.

Yeah, I mean, one last question, just listening to your talk.

And I'm trying to phrase this the right way.

I mean, a lot of the people in Western governments and people in kind of even global philanthropy,

you know, who focus on Africa and you, you know, cover Africa,

you know, strangely, the same kind of people that might celebrate Kagame for, you know, advances he's made in development and forged decades-long relationships with him.

He's very connected in Western governments and kind of the African philanthropic community.

They're like the same kind of people that, you know, also celebrate Dennis McQuege, the Congolese doctor who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the work he's done with women affected by rape in Eastern Congo.

Just hearing you talk made me think about the strangeness of this reality.

I mean,

what needs to change about how people who think that they care about Africa have gone about, you know, spending their dollars?

Because this seems like there's a lot of, obviously, contradiction embedded in, you know, giving awards to people that help women affected by conflict while also giving money to Kagame, who, you know, is in part behind a lot of the conflict.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that I come up against a lot, I mean, I'm from Sudan, and I feel like the thing that drives that cynical approach to Africa, to Sudan, to the DRC,

to other countries on the continent is this sense that we're kind of almost predestined to violence, that that's our lot in life, that this is just the nature of our countries and of our environments.

And I think that then gives,

you know, it's this

sense that, oh, if it's not us, you know, if it's not us, it will be the Chinese.

If it's not us, it will be the Russians.

But I think the moral high ground

manifests in that sort of regulatory

necessity.

You need to regulate the supply chain of minerals.

You need to be involved in the development of institutions on the continent.

Otherwise, these awards and

these sentiments of liberal values and development of Africa, they just feel very hollow.

And I think this is one of the things that we often face with conflict resolution entities, with international mediation, is that

When war does break out, the international community will come in, will make these proclamations of, you know, we condemn the violence, we condemn

the actions of one party or another while actively in deals, you know, making deals with one party or the other.

I mean, the EU came out with quite a strong statement condemning M23 and condemning Rwanda for its invasion, saying it must withdraw its troops from Congolese soil, at the same time condemning the Congolese army and the FTLR,

saying, also condemning the mining and saying that the UN Panel of Experts reports the findings of it are shocking while still

carrying on with their minerals deal.

So,

I mean, when you speak to young people on the continent, there's always really a sense of that kind of rising anti-Western sentiment comes from that sense of you don't let us into your countries, you know, you don't develop, you basically

enable, fund

the strong men who are ruining our lives.

You have a hegemony of

a structure, a global structure that puts kind of the Western perspective at the forefront, and yet you claim the moral high ground.

And that's across Africa.

And increasingly so, obviously, with the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Yeah, well, that's a really good note to end on a lot for people to think about.

Think about what's in your phone.

Think about where it comes from and think about the people there.

Yustra Elbadir, the Sky News Africa correspondent.

Everybody should follow your work on Sky and also on your own X, I know, and other social media platforms.

So thanks so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Ben.

Thanks again to Yustra for joining the show.

And thanks again to Noah Bullock for talking to me about all things El Salvador.

Your next door neighbor.

Wild.

Wild man.

Pats fan, I assume.

I think more Red Sox, but

when we were little, Patriot socks.

What's your pick here?

I think Eagles by, I'm going to say Eagles by a touchdown.

I don't think I can bet against Patrick Mahomes.

Yeah.

I think he's probably going to take it.

Yeah.

I know.

It's that kind of world now, isn't it?

Just rich, get richer.

Well, check in next week to see how long we were.

See you.

See you buddy.

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You'll taste pure ingredients, sustainable brewing, and a commitment to community.

And you'll taste a world of flavor from the legendary pale ale to the citrusy and smooth, hazy little thing and beyond.

It's flavor that takes its time, so you can make the most of yours.

See for yourself refined beer is sold.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, taste what matters.

Please drink responsibly.

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